MUSE-INGS

1- any of the nine sister goddesses in Greek mythology presiding over song, poetry, the arts and sciences

2- a source of inspiration; especially: a guiding genius

3- a poet

The concept of the muse goes all the way back to ancient Greek mythology where Zeus’s godly daughters presided artfully over different aspects of culture, inspiring its practitioners. Over the last few centuries, the term has come to define those people who fuel creative imagination, often being portrayed in various art forms such as film, fashion, poetry, paintings, music and Grazia…

Let’s meet some of the enchanting, free-spirited, challenging or tortured women or men who have been immortalised by great, visionary artists to do great works of art and let’s see how they have been inspired by their muses’ dynamism, shrewdness, promiscuity, and of course, their dangerous beauty when some of those fabled relationships were sometimes fraught with excitement, creativity, and yes… scandal. Oh la la…

Titbit: Did you know that the diminutive Victorine Meurent, nicknamed La Crevette (the shrimp), was not only Manet’s muse and a famous model for painters like Degas but that she was also an artist in her own right, who exhibited repeatedly at the prestigious Paris Salon? In 1876, her paintings were selected for inclusion at the Salon’s juried exhibition when Manet’s work was not. Their part-time sitter/lover relationship lasted just over a decade..

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI & MARGIT POGANY

Constantin Brancusi

Margit Pogany

Mademoiselle Pogany II (1913) by Brancusi

Titbit: Margit Pogany, a Hungarian art student, met Brancusi in Paris in 1910. Photographs show that Mademoiselle Pogany had a round face with large eyes and strong eyebrows, and wore her hair in a smooth chignon. The story goes he’d made a marble head of her from memory, then invited her back to his studio weeks later. He was delighted when she recognised it: “I’m awfully pleased that I recognised myself.” This was the beginning of a 26-year collaboration.

MAN RAY & LEE MILLER

Man Ray

Lee Miller

Solarised Portrait of Lee Miller (1929) by Man Ray

Titbit: In 1929, Lee Miller became the pupil and lover of Man Ray. Amongst the countless celebrities photographed by Man Ray – Wallis Simpson, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Picasso, Chanel, Schiaparelli, himself – the one he went back to most obsessively was Lee Miller. Despite a fall-out (in 1930 Miller fished a discarded photograph he had taken of her out of the dustbin in Ray’s darkroom and cropped it into a work of her own. He, outraged, slashed the picture’s neck and splattered the gash with drops of red ink.), the pair stayed friends for the rest of their lives. They last met in London in 1975, at Ray’s retrospective at the ICA. By then, he was in a wheelchair and Miller was a drunk, maddened by the horrors she had photographed during the Second World War.

PABLO PICASSO & DORA MAAR

Pablo Picasso

Dora Maar

Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) by Pablo Picasso

Titbit: Maar was Picasso’s partner during the period of his greatest political engagement. Her tragic air was caused, Picasso believed, by her inability to have children. When he threw her over for the much younger Françoise Gilot in 1943, Maar suffered a complete mental collapse, followed by nun-like seclusion. She ended her days surrounded by dust-encrusted relics of her time with Picasso. “After Picasso,” she famously declared, “only God.” Their relationship lasted seven years.

Titbit: Dietrich would always give von Sternberg full credit for her success, “I was nothing but pliable material on the infinitely rich palette of his ideas and imaginative faculties.” Von Sternberg’s assessment was slightly different, “I did not endow her with a personality that was not her own…I gave her nothing that she did not already have. What I did was to dramatize her attributes and make them visible for all to see.” After leaving Germany, the cycle of seven films directed by von Sternberg starring Dietrich lasted seven years before they ended their professional and private relationship.

JEAN COCTEAU & JEAN MARAIS

Jean Cocteau

Jean Marais

Orphée (1950) by Jean Cocteau starring Jean Marais

Titbit: Here is one of the love letters Cocteau wrote to Marais in 1939 in Paris. Their relationship lasted three decades until Cocteau’s death in 1963.

“My Jeannot,

It is Christmas, the most wonderful Christmas of my entire life. Your heart, your body, your soul, the happiness of living and working with you are all in my stocking. One subject might be `the useful present’, of which I disapprove. As superfluous. I shall look only at the hands that give it. My Jeannot, I can never tell you often enough: thank you, thank you for your creative genius, thank you for our love.

Titbit: “’It was instantaneous. I knew his reputation as a homosexual. I didn’t give a damn,’ Jeanne Moreau said. Paris was amazed and Cardin’s boyfriend was furious. He threatened suicide and had to be bought off. Their whirlwind romance in the 60s went on for five years but Cardin carried on dressing La Moreau for years to come. In 2001, she requested he made the inaugural speech when she was inducted into the French Academie des Beaux-Arts as the first woman in the Academie’s nearly 200-year history, which made her ‘une immortelle’ according to the tradition. These two icons of French culture are still, fifty years later, ‘les meilleurs amis du monde’.

ANDY WARHOL & EDIE SEDGWICK

Andy Warhol

Edie Sedgwick

Shots of Edie Sedgwick by Andy Warhol (1966)

Titbit: “I’m a little nervous about saying anything about the artist, because it kind of sticks him right between the eyes, but he deserves it. He really fucked up a great many people’s, young people’s lives.” That’s what The Factory Girl Edie Sedgwick is quoted to have said about Warhol after the ‘non-couple couple’ ‘s tumultuous but significant one-year-long artistic relationship ended.

Titbit: Distraught after the collapse of his relationship with Brigitte Bardot, Gainsbourg occupied himself with a role in the 1969 film Slogan. Playing opposite him was a charming, young English actor called Jane Birkin. Under the impression that her co-star hated her, Birkin arranged a dinner with him over which Gainsbourg, 18 years her senior, fell in love. Unfortunately, due to the amount of alcohol consumed throughout the date, the first night the pair spent together was in a hotel room … with Gainsbourg passed out drunk on the bed. One of the 60s most famous rock chicks would remain a couple until 1980, and inseparable friends until the end of Serge’s life in 1991.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE & PATTI SMITH

Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith

Horses (1975) by Patti Smith. Cover by Mapplethorpe

Titbit: In 1967, Patti Smith discovered whilst in a relationship with Mapplethorpe that he was sleeping with a young man named Terry. “If I had been going out with another woman, it would have been different,” Mapplethorpe later recounted, “But Patti couldn’t compete with a man…She went crazy.” Smith did indeed become suicidal, so she decided to take a break from her life in New York. She flew to Paris where she stayed for four months hanging out with street musicians, picking pockets and stalking the boulevards mapped out in her treasured Rimbaud biographies. She did return to NYC and Mapplethorpe and their stormy but then professional relationship carried on until 1974.

Titbit: Yves Saint Laurent once said of the great actress Catherine Deneuve: “She has always been special to me. I dressed her from the film Belle de Jour by Luis Buñuel. She is a woman who has a charm and a wonderful heart. For me, she is the biggest global star. We write often. I call her “Catherine, my sweetness,” and she sends me pale roses.” She attended his first première collection of prêt-à-porter line from his Rive Gauche store in 1966 and became his first customer. Their friendship and artistic colloboration lasted until Yves Saint Laurent’s death in 2008.

DEREK JARMAN & TILDA SWINTON

Tilda Swinton

Derek Jarman

Caravaggio (1986) by Derek Jarman starring Tilda Swinton

Titbit: Derek Jarman was the radical who directed a young Swinton in seven films, from the bold ‘Caravaggio’ in 1986 to the startling ‘Edward II’ in 1991 and, finally, the magnificent ‘Blue’ in 1993. Jarman died in 1994.”I think that the fact that the first nine years of my filmmaking life were almost exclusively spent working with Derek set my habits indelibly: the miracle is that, honestly, I’ve not been aware of having had to stray too far out of the zone since. The filmmakers who have approached me seem to know the territory of my interests and contribution and be up for it”, Swinton reminisces.

TOM FORD & JULIANNE MOORE

Tom Ford

Julianne Moore

A Single Man (2009) by Tom Ford starring Julianne Moore

Titbit: Ford and Moore had been friends since he designed her Gucci dress for the 1998 Oscars. “There’s always trepidation when someone you know sends you a script they’ve written,” Moore reflects when Ford approached her to play Charley in his movie A Single Man. “I wasn’t cynical but I had no idea what it was going to be […]. I loved it. The movie is so soulful. It’s about loving somebody and how that connection with another human being can be the defining thing in your life.” Moore has made regular contributions to Tom Ford’s womenswear collections since he launched his eponymous company in 2011.